What is a customer marketing platform?

MessageGears’ customer marketing platform is a differentiated marketing solution consisting of three products all built with a focus on smartly utilizing your data — providing audience segmentation (MessageGears Segment), cross-channel message creation and delivery (MessageGears Message), and real-time data availability by leveraging the power of your data warehouse (MessageGears Engage).

How does a customer marketing platform differ from an email service provider?

The most consequential difference between MessageGears’ customer marketing platform and a basic email service provider (ESP) is the customer marketing platform’s ability to connect directly to your database, making your data immediately available live and in real time for setting up highly personalized campaigns. Because of this, the customer marketing platform empowers marketers in a way no ESP can, letting you maximize the potential and performance of your data for delivering the best, most tailored customer experience via messaging across email, mobile push, and SMS text.

Is a customer marketing platform the same as a CDP?

Especially when it comes to MessageGears Segment, there are some similarities to a CDP. In fact, MessageGears Segment can provide the same basic functions of a CDP — providing a nice UI and view of your data in order to help with your audience segmentation. But there are key differences.

The most important of those is that MessageGears Segment connects directly to your database, while a CDP is going to ingest data from your database and store it for you to work with. That reduces the potential for what you can do with it, and vastly increases the cost compared to what you can get with MessageGears’ customer marketing platform. That direct data connection allows you to use your data warehouse as the single view of the customer rather than having your data spread across multiple houses of storage.

And, because MessageGears Segment is a light software install requiring no operations adjustments or language rewrites, it integrates seamlessly with modern data warehouses like Snowflake, Google BigQuery, Amazon RedShift, or any other database your team uses.

Can I send more than just email with a customer marketing platform?

MessageGears’ customer marketing platform is built to enable marketers to build campaigns across not just email, but mobile push and SMS text. Because of our direct data connection, though, not only can you build campaigns in these channels, but you can create sophisticated single campaigns capable of sending across any and all of the three depending upon the message intent, content, and customer preferences. This adds another level to your marketing team’s ability to customize and personalize the messaging campaigns you send.

How well does your customer marketing platform perform at scale?

For enterprise organizations, the good news is that MessageGears’ customer marketing platform is built specifically to address their needs related to scale, size, and speed. Our direct data connection is the only way Super Senders can send tens of millions of personalized marketing messages every month because it allows them to work directly with their live, real-time data, eliminating data friction by putting an end to nightly data syncs and the lag issues that inevitably come along with them.

Is a customer marketing platform for us if we don’t have our data in order?

Disorganized, siloed, and inaccessible data certainly presents a challenge for your organization, and we recommend you invest in a modern data warehouse and begin the process of putting your arms around the problem as soon as you can. But MessageGears’ customer marketing platform can be a big part of the solution, providing you with the incremental crawl-walk-run steps you need to begin using your data now, and growing its potential over time.

You can start with MessageGears Segment, plugging directly into whatever data source you’d like to use and using that data directly to build customized audiences and export them to your ESP for sending. Then incorporate MessageGears Engage to put the data to use with real-time experiences for your customers, storing a cache of your data from anywhere to always be available and performant, capable of accepting unlimited API calls to update emails or your website with up-to-the-moment information whenever it’s viewed. And then MessageGears Message can bring it all together when you’re ready, helping you send dynamic cross-channel campaigns using your live, real-time data as it sits in your database.

How much does your customer marketing platform cost?

While the actual, concrete costs vary from customer to customer, what we’ve found is that MessageGears’ customer marketing platform — and all the products that make it up — are consistently and significantly less expensive than the competitors in the ESP and CDP landscape. The chief reason why is our direct data connection, which is not only far more functional for Super Senders who want to do the most with their data, but is also less expensive because we don’t have to pass along data-storage costs.

It’s worth knowing that, with most ESPs and CDPs, data storage is a huge proportion of your costs. Because when they have customers sending tens or hundreds of millions of messages every month, it costs a significant amount to keep all that data accessible and ready to work with. But think about it: you’re already paying once to store it, behind your own firewall. If you’ve invested in a modern data warehouse, you did that with performance in mind. Why would you want to copy that data and then pay to store that copy somewhere else, especially when that “somewhere else” is less secure than your single source of truth? With MessageGears, keep that data where it belongs, and skip the costs and other hassles involved with storing it again.